Massive Links! Internets Edition

“New York photographer Jamie Beck has turned the GIF into a respected art form, presenting an interesting path for future use.” writes Rebecca Greenfield for The Atlantic. Yes, all those other GIFs were tacky and low brow, but now that this one looks like a video loop it’s “high art”. A better criteria for evaluating the merit of a work would be to ask what this manipulation adds to the meaning of the original work. Instead, the established status of one medium is used to elevate another. I am reminded of a video “painting” spotted at the Pulse fair two years ago, which animated the eyes of its sitter. I hated that too. Link via: Tom Moody

From the start, Bekman's motto for the business has been “Live With Art, It's Good For You,” which she knows can cause eye rolling among the culturati. “I feel like I have to defend it because it's such a pat, almost cheesy statement. But I really believe that people's lives are better because they have art around them,” she says. “I find it infuriating that art—which is such a joyful, emotional thing—is so fraught, that a lot of people have negative feelings around it. And some of it a mistrust of artists and the mistrust is: Are you trying to fool me?”

Prospect Executive Director and former Senior Curator for The New Museum Dan Cameron has a similarly cheese-y statement on his facebook page:

Art is the center of my life. I think art changes people, consciousness, and, ultimately, the world itself.